Students

So, it's already September, and Vancouver's five days of summer are fast becoming a blur? Aw, shuck. Oyster shuck, that is! Relax over a glass of Pinot, take in the breathtaking views and regale your McGill cohorts with stories of the summer cottage, crazy Aunt Edna from your family reunion, or your near hole-in-one. Welcome back!

"Sharing the Future: McGill and the Developing World" - In the era of globalization, Western nations must learn how to engage the growing power of the developing world in a productive partnership. McGill is well placed to play a crucial role in this dialogue, not only because of its stellar international academic reputation, but as a result of its global leadership, embodied by dozens of groundbreaking projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Dr. Joelle Pineau, School of Computer Science, McGill. Electrical stimulation has recently emerged as a promising therapy for patients with medically intractable epilepsy, but little is known about the best stimulation patterns to use in order to get maximal seizure reduction while minimizing long-term damage to the brain. This project's overall goal is to automatically optimize a closed-loop strategy for the control of deep brain stimulation using reinforcement learning methods. I will present some of the key methodological challenges that must be addressed in order to automatically learn adaptive treatment strategies in this context. In particular, I'll discuss (1) the use of ensemble methods to automatically detect seizures, (2) the design of a computational model of epilepsy to provide synthetic training data for the reinforcement learning agent, (3) initial results of applying reinforcement learning using in vitro recordings. This is joint work with Massimo Avoli, Aaron Courville, Arthur Guez, Phi

David Orr's career as a scholar, educator, writer, speaker and entrepreneur spans environment and politics, environmental education, campus greening, green building, ecological design and climate change. He is the author of "Ecological Literacy" (1991), "The Nature of Design" (2002) and "Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect" (1994, 2004); he served as an advisor to, and is interviewed and appears in, Leonardo DiCaprio's film "The 11th Hour."

The History and Theory of Architecture Program at McGill's School of Architecture, in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), will host an interdisciplinary conference to be held at McGill and the CCA. Highlights include: presentations by Juhani Pallasmaa, Lily Chi, David Leatherbarrow, Marco Frascari and Alberto Pérez-Gómez; an exhibition, "70 Architects," at the Centre de design, UQAM; tours of exhibitions and facilities at the CCA and McGill; a reception co-sponsored by the Embassy of Finland; a closing banquet in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the History and Theory of Architecture Program at McGill.

Join the McGill Toronto Alumni team as they participate in the world-renowned Terry Fox Run, an annual event that has raised more than $360 million worldwide for cancer research in Terry's name. This is the 8th year McGill alumni in Toronto have participated as a team.